Cyber sickness, 3rd edition house rule disussion Options

[Cantankerous]

So, after again watching Johny Mnemonic (a much better genre flick than Matrix ever was) again recently I started thinking about something for the newest 3rd edition campaign we are going to have running. This is going to be much less epic than the former campaign, grittier, grimmer and downright dark most of the time, by popular acclaim at that too. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) With those pre-conditions my mind turned to cyber sickness, which is never really covered in the rules and which is one of the things that made Jane from that movie actually interesting as a character. So, as one has to do in such situations, I came up with a mechanic for it. Since the campaign hasn't really started yet, I'm placing it here for discussion and suggestions. Thanks in advance for your help.

Cyber-sickness: What happens when you stick too much Cyberware in your body? You get sick. Sometimes real sick, other times it’s like a summer cold, but it’s almost omnipresent with a Essence of less than 1.0 and it get worse the less Essence you have remaining. The lesser degrees of it can be handled strictly with role playing the "summer cold" symptoms, but for the more drastic degrees we want a mechanic.

In basis if you have 1.0 Essence or higher you never need to make any rolls to avoid the effects. If, on the other hand, you are a more normal kind of guy in my Shadowrun games and have .0035 essence left, you’ve got problems.

For every full .2 essence under 1.0 that you have there is a single die rolled against a target number of 4, for every success there you have a +1 modifier to social skills die rolls if you do not remove them with a Willpower check with the same target number. That means that if you are about to roll any kind of social skills check you have the roll to worry about. As an example let’s take a guy with 0.15 essence remaining. He has to roll 4 dice against a target number 4 to determine how badly his twitching, or dead eyed stare or obvious cyber limb (or, heaven forbid, all of the above) bothers the person he is interacting with. Say he rolls a 4,2,1,5 on those dice. Two successes minus what ever he gets on a Will Power T#4 check are added to his target numbers for that check. Usually this won’t amount to much, but… �

Alphaware equal to ½ or more of the total essence use the person has decreases the penalty number suffered by 1, Betaware will decrease it by 2. Conversely if ½ or more is cheap or second hand Cyberware increase the penalty by 1, or by 2 if all of it is cheap or second hand stuff. Thus a guy with a ton of Betware would never have more than a +2 and usually nothing at all…meaning you really can’t tell he’s a near cyber-zombie most of the time. On the opposite side a guy who has loaded himself down with parts scavenged from corpses he created will sometimes have as much as a +6 modifier and as even if he has fractionally more essence, he really looks more the cyber-zombie part. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

So, there she is, basis. Suggestions and comments are very welcome. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)



Isshia